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                    Handling Multiple Environments
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            <h1>Handling Multiple Environments</h1>

            <p>
                Developers often desire different system behavior depending on whether
                an application is running in a development or production
                environment. For example, verbose error output is something that would
                be useful while developing an application, but it may also pose a security issue when "live".
            </p>

            <h2>The ENVIRONMENT Constant</h2>

            <p>
                By default, CodeIgniter comes with the environment constant set to
                '<kbd>development</kbd>'. At the top of index.php, you will see:
            </p>

            <code>
                define('<var>ENVIRONMENT</var>', '<var>development</var>');
            </code>

            <p>
                In addition to affecting some basic framework behavior (see the next section),
                you may use this constant in your own development to differentiate
                between which environment you are running in.
            </p>

            <h2>Effects On Default Framework Behavior</h2>

            <p>
                There are some places in the CodeIgniter system where the <kbd>ENVIRONMENT</kbd>
                constant is used. This section describes how default framework behavior is
                affected.
            </p>

            <h3>Error Reporting</h3>

            <p>
                Setting the <kbd>ENVIRONMENT</kbd> constant to a value of '<kbd>development</kbd>' will
                cause all PHP errors to be rendered to the browser when they occur. Conversely,
                setting the constant to '<kbd>production</kbd>' will disable all error output. Disabling
                error reporting in production is a <a href="security.html">good security practice</a>.
            </p>

            <h3>Configuration Files</h3>

            <p>
                Optionally, you can have CodeIgniter load environment-specific
                configuration files. This may be useful for managing things like differing API keys
                across multiple environments. This is described in more detail in the
                environment section of the <a href="../libraries/config.html#environments">Config Class</a> documentation.
            </p>

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